Social Media's Trojan Farce - BITTER

An interesting thing is happening as of late. More and more people are getting their news online, especially from social media sites, instead of from TV and newspapers. There is an unfortunate problem with this that needs to be discussed, though. On the Internet, there are few editors. Anyone can write anything. And then someone comes along and takes an unedited, unchecked piece of information and propagates it as fact, often citing it in a blog or other article of their own.

A recent example of this involves a blog post titled, "Riding Social Media's Trojan Horse", by Alexandra Samuel via the Harvard Business Publishing website. In the story, she discussed 3 high profile companies, McDonald's, Hertz, and Walmart, that didn't fare well as the result of social media exposure.

In each case, Alexandra goes into a brief overview of the situation each company faced, hyperlinking key phrases which link back to the original "news story". While these links make her story seem far more legitimate, each link merely points back to another blogger's post.

In the McDonald's case, the source blog is riddled with guesswork and no fact checking to back it up. The author, Mack Collier, never indicates whether or not he tried to contact McDonald's to find out why comments were taking so long to show up on their blog (which means he didn't). So he just suggests that they are likely censoring it. But he doesn't know. Alexandra herself provides mostly facts in her description of the story, but it doesn't change the fact that she is republishing what are essentially another bloggers comments and assumptions as fact.

The same goes for the Hertz incident. It gets a bit worse here because the video clip that she references in her post directly contradicts most of what is written. She mentions that the lone Hertz agent leaves the customers unattended, which is completely untrue. In the video you can see at least one other person working at the counter and at least one customer using one of the rental kiosks. The problem is, the guy who shot the video is aggressively narrating and tries to convince the viewer that you are not seeing what you really are are seeing. And he does a good job. If Alexandra has read the comments on that video, they go at least 50/50 with many disgusted with the way the person behaved toward the Hertz agent. Again though, the video itself is treated as worthy of reference as fact.

It is more of the same again for Walmart. While this story does seem grounded in basic fact, one has to be concerned when reading that media mentions went from positive to criticism. The media site that gets linked to for the criticism? Wikinomics. I was expecting maybe USA Today or CNN. Wikinomics is not mentioned by name, though, as it is relatively unknown and will likely detract from the believability of the story.

Let's face facts. Most readers will not follow any of the links from this story. The mere presence of hyperlinks gives the blog post more implied credibility, as does it being published on a site with Harvard in the name. Does it really have credibility? I don't think so. Neither Alexandra nor any of her sources seems to have many any attempts to contact the companies being discussed to get a balanced view of any of the situations being presented. The 3 companies are vilified and the court of public opinion adjourned. Funny enough, I think that is the real point of the blog post. It tries to talk about how social media can burn a company that isn't ready. However, I'm not sure Alexandra really meant to be pushing the problems with social media to the next level.

Could each of the companies have done a better job? Absolutely. I just don't think any of them have been treated fairly here in a blog post masquerading as a well researched news story.

Somehow, we are letting the people who normally get interviewed by reporters on street corners become the reporters themselves. What we end up with isn't reporting at all. It's commenting. And that's what most blogs are (including mine). They are usually just some person's comments. That's not really news, is it? But that's how it is received and most readers are none the wiser.

Since this blog post was published, it has been tweeted over 100 times, bookmarked about half that, and cited in other blog posts that have since gone on to be pushed out by some high profile Twitter users like @guykawasaki. In the end, this "article" has been sent to hundreds of thousands of readers, most of whom will implicitly trust it as valid and trustworthy news.

Bloggers masquerading as reporters (you know who you are), you get a BITTER.